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Tag: "business plan"

Indianola Municipal Utilities (IMU) in Iowa finalized its business plan for citywide Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) service earlier this month. The decision marks a shift in how residents receive services in the community; IMU will take over from current partner Mahaska Communications Group (MCG) and expand to offer triple-play citywide.

Up To Now

Indianola created its municipally owned broadband utility back in 1997 and invested in fiber-optic backbone infrastructure a year later. They used the investment to backhaul fixed wireless service beginning in 2002 and by 2006 had developed a partnership with MCG. Expanding fiber to residents didn’t start until 2010 and two years later, MCG began offering triple-play services within certain areas of the city. Last year, the community commissioned a feasibility study to examine the possibility of using existing fiber resources to all premises in Indianola.

Under the current agreement between IMU and MCG, wholesale rates for residential connections are $30 per month and $100 per month for commercial connections. The feasibility study determined that the current rates “did not support expansion” to the entire Indianola community.

Trustees Say OK

Under the business plan approved by the Trustees at the May 8th meeting, IMU will step into MCG’s shoes and will buy out MCG’s existing 596 customers. IMU will be the FTTH retail services provider, offering triple-play of Internet access, VoIP, and IPTV. The network will work with Cedar Falls Utilities (CFU) on video services, connecting at the Des Moines regional data facility in order to reach them. IMU will have the opportunity to tap into about 7,350 potential residents and businesses in addition to MCG’s current customers.

The plan for expansion divides the city into 26 service areas but subscribers need to sign up early in order for the utility to connect their home. People who participate in early sign up will all have services activated at the same time. IMU has proposed rates for different services including:

Last week, the city of New Orleans, through the Foundation for Louisiana (FFL), released a Request for Proposals (RFP) in its search for technical expertise to provide a fiber-optic network design and services related to its construction. Proposals are due October 24th.

The Vision

The Institutional Network (I-Net) design vision encompasses the entire city and will also provide wireless services. It will serve traffic light and advanced camera systems, streetlights, in addition to Internet, VoIP, video conferencing, and a list of other services cities use on a regular basis. From the RFP:

Ultimately, this new fiber network will help meet New Orleans’ goal to serve city-owned and operated buildings and facilities located throughout the 350-square mile city. This new network will improve services to residents, support implementation of Smart City applications and assist the City to achieve cost efficiencies in daily operations while helping disadvantaged residents to bridge the digital divide.

As part of this project, high-speed Internet access may also be offered for public use in city-owned or supported facilities like parks, libraries and New Orleans Recreation Development Commission (NORDC) centers. The City imagines working with community organizations to offer new services such as digital skills training in these spaces. Additionally, this project will explore design options that allow the network to be leveraged for future potential public private partnerships.

A Number Of Tasks To Tackle

As part of the arrangement, FFL expects some specific tasks from the firm that will be awarded the contract. They will strategize network design process, create a geodatabase documenting in detail where infrastructure will be needed. The firm will have to develop a detailed infrastructure assessment and strategic plan so city leaders know what resources they have and what they can use for the new network. As part of the project they will have to identify the network requirements to meet the city’s goals, craft a...

Harford County, a mixed suburban and rural area in northeast Maryland, flipped the switch in late May on its Harford Metro Area Network (HMAN). The network includes 160 miles of fiber bringing high speed broadband to 150 sites, including all area schools, fire stations, libraries, and county and municipal buildings.

The project required $13.8 million in general obligation bonds from the county's capital improvement budget to construct four main fiber optic loops, with lateral connections leading to local anchor institutions. Not all planned facilities are connected yet, but construction will continue throughout the summer, as will the development of a business plan to determine how best to offer connections to local businesses and residences. Connections in the more rural northern area of the county will be wireless, due to the higher cost of building out to each home in lower density areas.

County Director of Information and Communication Technology Ted Pibil estimated that the county will save approximately $1 million per year by owning its own network, allowing it to cut ties with Verizon and Comcast. All of Harford County’s 54 public schools will see benefits as well, with increases in bandwidth of 50-100 times.

Harford County Sheriff Jesse Bane emphasized the public safety benefits of having a reliable communications network built with multiple contingencies in mind:

"This is going to provide the sheriff’s office with redundancy. That’s something we do not have at this time. It is something we have always considered a very precarious situation to be in… this will move us forward.”

While HMAN is funded entirely by county bonding, it builds on the backbone infrastructure of the OneMaryland Network, a stimulus-funded project that connects every county in the state. The press conference announcing the start of network operations can be seen here.

WSOC TV in Charlotte recently looked at Salisbury's four-year-old Fibrant network. Reporter Tenikka Smith investigated what a municipal network could do for Charlotte. Charlotte is also one of the communities working with Google in hopes of having it expand to them. That interest has led AT&T to consider updating its comparatively pathetic DSL services as well.

Smith spoke with a Salisbury small business owner who switched to Fibrant in 2010. Rick Anderson-McCombs of the Sidewalk Deli noted fast speeds and high quality voice service from Fibrant. According to Anderson-McCombs' mother, Angenetta Dover, the deli also saves $30 - $40 per month compared to past service with the local incumbent. Dover also uses the service at her home and notices a significant improvement:

"Even (the) lowest speed and slowest speed is super compared to what we used to have to do," she said.

Robert Van Goen from Rowan County's economic development coalition, Rowan Works, believes a municipal network could be a smart investment for Charlotte. The network tells potential job creators that a community is "prepared to do business for the next 10, 15, 20 years and compete in the global marketplace."

Saving money for better service is always a winning strategy. Local businesses often consider other benefits from municipal networks; Anderson-McCombs told Smith his motivation reached beyond financials:

“The main reason I got Fibrant was not so much to help my business, but help my town because I think it's very progressive of Salisbury to include Wi-Fi and Internet service in our utilities."...

This is a show I have been wanting to do for years - discussing some of the common mistakes that have been make by community owned networks. Offering broadband and other telecommunications services is a difficult business for any entity, public or private and all network owners make mistakes. The vast majority of these errors can be and are fixed so the network may carry on.

While in Dallas for the Broadband Communities Summit, I asked Design Nine founder Andrew Cohill about common problems faced by community owned networks and how to prepare for them or avoid them entirely.

We discuss how having a strong business plan is essential, with some of the requirements that should be included. We agree that a reliance on grant funding is a giant warning flag. We also discuss a number of other things new networks should watch out for, especially overstaffing.

This week, Josh Wallace from the City of Palo Alto Utilities joins us to talk about the City's dark fiber network for episode 26 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast. Josh describes how the dark fiber network connects businesses, offering incredibly high capacity connections at affordable flat rate pricing.

The utility charges an upfront fee to make a dark fiber connection, which means that nearly all the ongoing revenues are net income. It is a very good business to be in, both for the utility and local businesses that would have to pay much more for their connections if the City did not offer the dark fiber option.

Despite its success in dark fiber, Palo Alto is not poised to offer any lit services -- which would dramatically increase the potential number of customers. The main reason appears to be the difficulty of competing with the nation's largest cable company, Comcast. Its massive footprint allows Comcast to engage in predatory pricing and other anti-competitive tactics to ensure competitors have a miserable life. Though some cities, Chattanooga especially, have done very well competing against Comcast (one of the nation's most hated corporations year after year), other communities are simply unwilling to engage in what can be a brutal fight.

Our fourteenth episode of Community Broadband Bits is an interview with Bob Frankston, who has made many important contributions to the development of both computers an telecommunications. His bio is here, but this is his present passion:

My current interest is moving beyond the 19th century concept of telecom to community owned infrastructure. This would add hundreds of billions of dollars to the US and much more value by creating opportunity for what we can't imagine.

Our interview discusses how the Internet is much more than something you connect to via a cable or telephone company. Fundamentally, we should be building networks that allow ubiquitous access to communications, not designing networks around billing relationships. Confused about what that means? Listen to our interview below and read some of his writings.

Monticello is fairly rare in the publicly owned FTTH region because it does not have a public power utility and services on the network are provided by a third party, Hiawatha Broadband Communications -- a Minnesota company with an excellent reputation and track record.

Unfortunately, Monticello's network suffered costly delays due to a frivolous lawsuit filed by the incumbent phone company in a bid to bleed the publicly owned network while it suddenly invested in its own second generation network (that it previously maintained was totally unnecessary for a small town like Monticello).

Monticello lost a full year on the project, which has hurt its finances significantly. More unexpectedly, it has become the only community in North America where all residents have a choice between FTTH networks. They also have Charter in the mix. Add to this the economic downturn that hit just after they financed the network in 2007 -- the population growth has been much lower than forecast. The predictable result? Much lower prices, lots of community savings, and a publicly owned network that is behind its projections.

The local paper recently ran a story about the project, "FiberNet struggles in a sea of red. Should you read the full piece, please be aware that the inaptly named "Freedom Foundation" has no credibility, existing solely to defend massive corporations like cable and telephone companies.

For those who wonder why incumbents filed absurd lawsuits that have a vanishingly small chance of winning, note this discussion from the story:

“It stopped us from really building the system by about a year,” said Finance Director Tom Kelly, “which put our revenue collections about a year behind. Obviously if you don’t have a system, you can’t bill...